Joe Biden

Ethics Alarms Ethics Check: Did Joe Biden Call Ted Cruz And Josh Hawley “Nazis”? [Revised]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Big Lie

I don’t do factchecks, I do ethics checks. Both GOP Senators Ted Cruz and and Josh Hawley have leaped on a Joe Biden attack and said that the President Elect called them “Nazis.” Many conservative pundits and websites have similarly accused Biden of the ultimate “otherizing.”

Biden did not call Cruz and Hawley Nazis.

He told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, where Joe is God,

“They should be just flat beaten the next time they run. The American public has a real good, clear look at who they are. They’re part of the big lie.Goebbels and the great lie. You keep repeating the lie, repeating the lie.”

Because Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler defined the Big Lie tactic–that’s what Biden is referring to when he says “Goebbels and the great lie”— and though they authored one of the biggest Big Lies of all time, saying that a politician or a political party is using the Big Lie tactic cannot be the equivalent of calling that politician Hitler, Goebbels, or a Nazi. The reason is that long before the two Nazi propaganda experts mastered the Big Lie, it had been used extensively for centuries, and it has been used ever since often with great effectiveness, always unethically, by parties and politicians who could not possibly be called Nazis in their beliefs, policies, values or methods. The Big Lie is now a standard political weapon. The idea is to make a public assertion that is so horrifying and outlandish that the public demands that it be denied by its target, and argued about. The genius of the Big Lie tactic is that forcing the argument itself gives the Big Lie credibility. The approach of simply ignoring Big Lies and saying by word or action, “That doesn’t even justify a rebuttal, and I won’t dignify it with one” usually doesn’t work.

I swear, the first example of this that jumped into my head was Harry Reid’s intentional slur during the 2012 Presidential campaign that Mitt Romney had paid no taxes for the previous decade. When asked about his Big Lie after the election, Reid answered, “Romney didn’t win, did he?”

The Big Lie tactic is all about the ends justifying the means.

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On Revenge, Tit-For-Tat And The Biden Presidency

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

tit for tat

I would really like to accept the Biden Presidency as I have accepted every Presidency in my life so far, and without giving away secrets, there have been a lot of them. You see, I really believe what Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton lectured Donald Trump about when they were certain Hillary would win the 2016 election. I believe that the American public, no matter who each individual voter may have favored, ought to welcome the newly elected President with hope and good will, pronounce the past irrelevant, and pledge to do whatever is necessary to make the incoming administration successful. In other words, every American should behave exactly as Democrats (including Hillary and Nancy), progressives, the resistance, numerous professional groups and the vast majority of the news media did not behave when President Trump was elected.

Why do I believe this? As I have said so many times I am sick of me, I believe this because that response is the only way republics can survive, and because that is how this republic has survived and thrived since the Civil War. If you would peruse the Ethics Alarms posts on the topic and related ones since November 2016, as I viewed the impending Presidency of Donald Trump with the approximate enthusiasm of one diagnosed with genital warts, one message was consistent: we break this tradition at great risk. If the Axis of Unethical Conduct (I didn’t call them that for a while, but that’s the alliance that was responsible–-the resistance, Democrats, and the news media) devotes itself to savaging and undermining the nation’s duly elected President by any means necessary, it-they will guarantee a cycle in which political warfare, which once was de-escalated every four years, will be a constant, making cooperation, unity, and competent government impossible.

Is Joe Biden “my” President? Sure he is. I’m an American, and our system made him President. Do I want him to succeed? Sure I do. Failed Presidencies are bad for all Americans, the nation and the world. If Joe Biden asked me to take on a project, a job or an assignment, would I say yes? Unless I found the substance of what I was asked to do objectively unconscionable, yes I would.

However, it is clear as day now that there is no way Democrats and progressives can avoid the consequences of their shattering the norm that once gave Presidents a “honeymoon” and that guaranteed every President-Elect overwhelming public support simply by his stepping into the metaphorical shoes of Washington and Lincoln. Could there have been a way? The manner in which Biden and his supporters have handled the transition so far would have killed any wisp of a chance if there were one, and I doubt there ever was. The “now that we’ve regained power by breaking the rules, we hope everyone will go back to following them again for the good of the country” routine is too insulting and cynical to generate anything but resentment.

Still, what f Joe had come out in November and said,

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Afternoon Ethics Breather, 12/11/2020: Train Wreck Free Zone, Because I Need A Break

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Dog-vacation

1. Sorry, but there was and is no excuse.. The New Yorker reports that Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) is in serious cognitive decline:

[M]any others familiar with Feinstein’s situation describe her as seriously struggling, and say it has been evident for several years. Speaking on background, and with respect for her accomplished career, they say her short-term memory has grown so poor that she often forgets she has been briefed on a topic, accusing her staff of failing to do so just after they have. They describe Feinstein as forgetting what she has said and getting upset when she can’t keep up. One aide to another senator described what he called a “Kabuki” meeting in which Feinstein’s staff tried to steer her through a proposed piece of legislation that she protested was “just words” which “make no sense.” Feinstein’s staff has said that sometimes she seems herself, and other times unreachable. “The staff is in such a bad position,” a former Senate aide who still has business in Congress said. “They have to defend her and make her seem normal.”

Well gee, what a surprise. Ethics Alarms criticized the Senator for having the hubris and not showing proper responsible conduct in 2018, when she ran for re-election and another 6 year term at the age of 85. That was ridiculous, and it was foolish for her constituents to vote for her. Now they are stuck with a Senator who can’t do the job, and it is their fault, plus that of the Democratic Party and Feinstein herself. They all deserve what they get.

Particularly nauseating in the New Yorker story is this section:

“Some former Feinstein aides insist that rumors of her cognitive decline have been exaggerated, and that video clips taken out of context can make almost anyone look foolish. They also bridle at singling out her condition, because declining male senators, including Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, and Robert Byrd, of West Virginia, were widely known by the end of their careers to be non-compos mentis. “For his last ten years, Strom Thurmond didn’t know if he was on foot or on horseback,” one former Senate aide told me.”

Is this the quality of thought on Capitol Hill? A single idiot making such an argument is too many: “Hey, don’t criticize us for having walking vegetables weilding the power of U.S. Senators:we should be able to do it becaise Republicans did it!”

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Ethics Warm-Up,12/10/2020, Even Though You’re Probably Warm Already From Your Head Exploding

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

head explosion

Gag me with a spoon. The Times this week published yet another dreamy, worshipful portrait of Barack Obama…

Obama yecchh

… along with the kind of journalistic fawning we became used to during his eight years of weak and feckless leadership:

“A Promised Land” uses his improbable journey — from outsider to the White House and the first two years of his presidency — as a prism by which to explore some of the dynamics of change and renewal that have informed two and a half centuries of American history. It attests to Mr. Obama’s own storytelling powers and to his belief that, in these divided times, “storytelling and literature are more important than ever,” adding that “we need to explain to each other who we are and where we’re going.”

Has the Times ever published a single paragraph, much less an entire article, about the current President with such an admiring tone? Has anyone published a photo like that of President Trump, rather than one which made him look sinister, manic or brooding? I’m trying to think back and determine if any President has been as insufferably smug as Barack Obama, or acclaimed despite such a dearth of positive accomplishments. Clinton would be the closest in the first category, Kennedy in the latter.

1. Don’t encourage him. Donald Trump will be a disqualifying 78 years old when 2024 rolls around. He will have no business running for President at that age, but if trend hold, he will do it anyway, essentially playing Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 and letting his unrestrained ego wreck any chances the Republican might have of finding new leadership and defeating whoever the Democrats run. Trump will be back where he was in 2012 and 2016, running for President without any concern for the damage it may do.

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Rainy Monday Ethics, 11/30/2020: Statues, Dogs And Lies

/ Jack Marshall / 61 Comments

Also getting me down, Karen Carpenter songs. As with great movies with O.J. Simpson or Gig Young in them, these are hard to enjoy now, at least for me. One of the most lovely natural voices in pop music history was silenced by the pernicious disease of anorexia, exacerbated by, among others, her brother, her family, and music industry executives, who made Carpenter so self-conscious about her weight and appearance that she slowly starved herself to death before her 33rd birthday. I wish I could hear her sing—and I will do that a lot in the days approaching Christmas—without thinking about that, but I can’t.

1. Proposition: any nation’s historical figures who had the impact on those nations that Margaret Thatcher did in Great Britain over a significant period of time deserve to be memorialized with statues, absent some cataclysmic disqualifying act, like Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Even in Nixon’s case, I would support a public memorial to such a historically influential figure.

In the English town of Grantham, where Thatcher grew up, an 11-foot pedestal awaits the arrival next year of a large statue of “the Iron Lady.” Apparently many in Britain, and a large proportion of Gratham’s working class residents, disapprove of Thatcher’s conservative politics and policies, and thus oppose the statue, which will be in immediate danger of toppling the minute it is erected.

Morons. One doesn’t have to personally agree with a historical figure’s position or even admire her to appreciate the impact that figure had. The criteria for memorializing prominent citizens should center on whether future generations need to know who they were and what they did, not whether their achievements and conduct are approved of according to often fleeting political, social and cultural values. Charles Moore, who wrote an authorized biography of Mrs. Thatcher, says, “It’s obvious there should be statues to Britain’s first woman prime minister. But…but…George Floyd! The New York Times’ article on the controversy says that statue toppling has become a world-wide phenomenon since the death of George Floyd. Now that makes sense: one of Great Britain’s most successful and important leaders should be robbed of her legitimate honors because a rogue cop accidentally contributed to the death of a black criminal in Minnesota.

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Early Sunday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/8/2020: The 2020 Presidential Election Ethics Train Wreck Accelerates…

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments

Train-Wreck air

The news media, Democrats and Trump-Haters—are there any Biden supporters, I wonder?—are behaving like—no other word will do— assholes to a degree that even I could not have imagined. They are doing so in such a flagrant matter that one has to ask if they all really are assholes, if they are this way permanently now, and if we can ever trust any of them again. Gloating, threatening, insulting and lying is not the way to heal the damage done to the nation (by them, primarily) over the last four years.

Do not send Ethics Alarms comments about how “this is no surprise.” Just cut that out. Writing that mitigates the offense. It is a surprise. It may have been predictable, but one has to be surprised at such despicable conduct by such a huge component of the population, or one just has to give up.

It’s unethical to give up.

1. I just blocked my first Twitter account, and it was that of the self-banned, former puckish Ethics Alarms commenter Jeff Field, known here as Fattymoon. Jeff was an enthusiastic member of Occupy Wall Street, meaning he was essentially an anarchist and thoroughly deluded, but he was treated well here. Then he went off to Medium to attack me and the blog by name. That’s fine. What’s not fine is the string of tweets he has sent out lately threatening me for daring to point out the same kinds of issues I’m covering in this post. That is signature significance for both an asshole and a totalitarian (anarchists are often totalitarians, as long as they see themselves in charge, and all totalitarians are assholes).

I really thought better of Jeff. I have never blocked anyone on Twitter; I object to it on principle, but I’m willing to be insulted—I know how to defend myself—but threats on social media are intolerable.

2. The news media cannot ethically refer to Joe Biden as “the President-elect.” He isn’t. That’s a fact. They didn’t call George W. Bush “President Elect” when Al Gore and Florida Democrats were searching high and low for any way to flip Florida into the Gore column in 2000, and at this point, the 2020 election is no more decided than that one was. It is a remarkable—and obviously unethical—exercise for the news media to declare Biden the winner and then use its own fake news to proclaim him President-elect. There are sufficient states with their vote totals in question, with recounts looming and lawsuits mounting, to wait. Waiting costs nothing; premature declarations and celebrations make the nation look ridiculous, because at this juncture, it is ridiculous.

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Early Morning Observations On Election 2020. So Far

/ Jack Marshall / 116 Comments

Fox News Arizona

I got up at 4:30 am to scan the various news sources after going to bed at 1:30 am following a night of checking the incoming results online and on TV. Don’t expect eloquence….

Observations:

1. Chaos. This is why allowing main-in ballots was either galactically stupid or a deliberate effort to cause confusion and seed armed insurrection. The intent was so, so clear that I really don’t know what to make of those who supported it. Mail-in ballots create problems of security and chain of custody, unnecessarily delaying the determination of critical races, notably the Presidential election. The postal service is not reliable, as I can personally attest with all the checks from ProEthics clients that routinely arrive late, not at all, or end up at the wrong address. The fiasco, was, in turn, yet another creation of the politically motivated fearmongering over the Wuhan virus. It is not hard to vote “safely” in person while wearing masks and socially distancing. I never came close to touching or breathing on another person, or they on me, when I voted yesterday. The Left wants, and has always wanted, a less secure, effortless, commitment-free voting system which it believes helps low-information, easily-led voters to participate who couldn’t be bothered otherwise. (Next will be a push for online voting, once mail-in voting proves to be the catastrophe it was always sure to be.)

2. The narrative leading up to the election, that Biden had an insurmountable lead and that the President was certain to lose was false. Again, whether it was intentionally false to suppress pro-Trump votes, or just astounding incompetence, conformation bias and irresponsible reporting and polling at work, I don’t know (but I have my suspicions.) That narrative never made sense with all of the other factors involves…the nature of the Presidency, the behavior of Democrats since 2016, the disgrace of the news media, the pathetic Democratic ticket, the transparent dishonesty of blaming the President for the lock-down and pandemic deaths, the backdrop of the 2016 election, and more.

As I wrote here, over and over again.

That’s as close to “I told you so!” as I’m going to write, but you know, I do know some things. I’m not just sitting here pulling stuff out of the air. Have a little trust and faith. I think I’ve earned it.

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Decided: The Ten Reasons I’ll Be Voting To Re-Elect President Trump [6-10]

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Hiding Biden meme

[Reasons 1-5 are here; the Preface to this exercise is here.]

6. I hate to quote Newt Gingrich, whom I detest, but in an appearance on Fox News yesterday predicting a Trump victory, he put his finger on a factor that the media (and pundits like Nate Silver) seem to ignore or not understand. (Newt is despicable, but he’s not dumb.) He said,

“In the end, as you watched these two candidates campaigning, I think it’s coming down to sort of a bunny rabbit hiding in a basement protected by the news media and a bear who is wandering around on the stage courageously without fear. If you think the world is dangerous, whether the dangers are riots in Philadelphia or the dangers are the Chinese communists, you probably want a bear that is strong enough to defend you and not a bunny rabbit that has to be protected by the news media. I think every day that Biden hides and Trump goes out and campaigns, the psychological message being driven to the American people is really deeper than just ideology or partisanship. It says one guy has the guts, the willingness, the toughness to actually be out here, taking on things including Covid. The other guy is hiding, frightened, hoping the news media will save him because he can’t possibly save himself. And I think that sinks in,” he continued. “And I think that’s why you are seeing in virtually every poll I trust we’re seeing a steady drift towards Trump and away from the undecided and away from sort of leaning towards Biden but not sold. My personal bet is it will lead to a surprising majority for Trump.”

I don’t quote Newt to suggest the likely outcome, but rather to explain how this factor influenced my decision. Reluctant leaders are lousy leaders, and for the most part, they don’t reach the Presidency, and shouldn’t. I admire Trump for campaigning so vigorously despite the chorus from the media that he will lose, despite the constant hate directed his way, despite being in his mid-seventies and having just had a bout with the Wuhan virus. The man is working. He wants it. I see no evidence that Joe Biden really wants the job, or, if he does, that he’s capable of fighting for it. If he’s not capable of fighting to be President, he is not capable of being President once he’s elected.

7. The decision by the Democrats to allow the Biden ticket to represent the party and its supporters in the 2020 election will stand as the most cynical, irresponsible and unethical act by any political party in American history, only rivaled by the same party’s decision to let a dying President Roosevelt run for a 4th term in 1944. At least that version of the party had some excuses: there was a world war to wrap up, and many in the party leadership didn’t know just how sick FDR was, since he actively hidden the fact. These Democrats have no such excuses.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 10/30/2020: Zoomed Out

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Zoom

Why is it that running a Zoom seminar from my office is far more exhausting than standing up and talking for three hours?

On the positive side, I was actually allowed to post an Ethics Alarms link today! I wonder if Sean Lennon reads Ethics Alarms…

1. And this woman was an early participant in the Democratic primary debates, in case you’re wondering how the party ended up with Joe Biden. New Age guru Marianne Williamson tweeted,

Williamson debate

Oopsie! Missed that “Thou shalt not steal” thing. So she came back with, “Actually, ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is of course in there. But my point about priorities remains the same.”

Wait, what point would that be? A) It sounds a lot like Rationalization #22. So because stealing isn’t as bad as murder, stealing is OK? B) Is she making a technical legal point that a man waving a knife around and refusing to drop it is “innocent” because he hasn’t been proven guilty? Or is her point that because the victim in the Philadelphia shooting may have been out of his mind meant that he couldn’t form the “mens rea” to be technically guilty of a crime? By these calculations, nobody who is shot by the police is ever guilty, because they are resisting the arrest that would eventually put them on trial.

2. Actual quote from Joe Biden yesterday: “Spending! We’re gonna roost. And we are gonna reduce prescription drug crisis experts acknowledge.”

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The Ethics Arguments For Voting For President Trump And Joe Biden, Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

2020 election

I’ll start with Biden, because the conclusion is easier, the argument is shorter, and the path is clearer.

There is no ethical argument for voting for Joe Biden, or the Democrats, in the 2020 election. None. Zip.

It’s really as simple as that. He is obviously sliding down the road to dementia: nominating him is the most irresponsible and cynical act by a major political party since the same party nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt for a fourth term while knowing that he was desperately ill and unlikely to survive two years, much less four. Like today’s Democrats, they didn’t even take care to make certain that they had a Vice President who was up to the job. Indeed, there was no reason to believe that Harry Truman, a career political hack from the Missouri machine, had the character or skills to be President even with the most generous assessment of his record. But at least he wasn’t chosen purely because he had the right skin shade and primary sex characteristics. Yes, the democrats and the nation lucked out with Truman, who was one of the cases in Presidential history where a man has risen to the challenge, surpassing all expectations and past levels of performance. Depending on that to happen again is madness.

Even if he were not too old and cognitively damaged to be President, Joe Biden’s abandonment of so many of his previously held—well, supposedly—principles to maintain the support of the far, anti-American Left would be disqualifying. He should be disqualified because he is a serial sexual harasser running under the cloud of an accusation or workplace sexual assault. After all, his party, and his Vice President, declared such a record intolerable not very long ago. The emerging facts about his evident corruption in dealings with his son’s business interests should be disqualifying.

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